A copper ingot cast somewhere in inland Sardinia during the Bronze Age might, centuries later, turn up in a Scottish tomb or a village in southern Sweden. That is the striking picture drawn by Serena Sabatini, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, in a new paper that pulls together decades of isotopic analyses to […]

Workers were preparing to build a block of flats in Ligornetto, a small town in the canton of Ticino, right on the border with Italy, when they hit the remains of a Roman factory built almost two thousand years ago. Since June 2026, the Archaeology Service of Ticino’s Office of Cultural Heritage has been excavating […]

Forty years ago, archaeologist Lucien Basch and researcher Michal Artzy published a set of 19 ship graffiti carved into the walls of Kition Kathari, an archaeological site beneath the modern city of Larnaca on Cyprus’s southern coast. Ever since, those images have been cited as textbook examples of Late Bronze Age maritime iconography in the […]

In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thousand years ago. On the other side, they documented a pre-Roman aqueduct, now walkable for roughly 100 meters (about 328 […]

Some 40 miles (65 km) from Thessaloniki, a teenager who would go on to reshape the ancient world once sat listening to lessons on physics, ethics and politics under stone colonnades. That teenager was Alexander the Great; his teacher was Aristotle; and the classroom was a monumental gymnasium carved into the rock near the modern […]

Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for raids by Libyan tribes and, later, the loosely defined coalition of invaders known as the Sea Peoples. One of those tribes, […]

A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana Măriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza […]

Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still […]

The site is provisionally dated to a six-century stretch, from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, offering a window into funerary rites practiced by a population that neither buried nor cremated its dead — long before that same principle produced the famous Towers of Silence. The find comes from Odirmon, a site […]

Anyone planning to build in Pontecagnano Faiano, near Salerno, has learned to expect a tomb underneath. That happened again this year, and this time the find was unusual enough that archaeologists had only seen its like twice before in more than sixty years of excavation. Preventive digging ahead of a private housing development uncovered a […]

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]

One grape variety still grown in Spanish vineyards, hebén, has never gone out of cultivation for at least the last 1,100 years, according to the new study. That takes its lineage back to roughly the year 929, around when the Caliphate of Córdoba was proclaimed in southern Spain. Eleven centuries of unbroken agriculture, and the […]

A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied […]

The site is called Külhöyük, in the Oyaca neighborhood of Ankara’s Gölbaşı district, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of the capital. It’s a tell — the term Near Eastern archaeology uses for an artificial mound built up by layer upon layer of human occupation — roughly 250 by 150 meters (820 by 490 feet) […]

The body has been lying face-down for close to two thousand years. When archaeologists reached tomb 162, on the outskirts of modern Solin, Croatia, they immediately noticed something at odds with the rest of the cemetery: the deceased had not been laid on their back, as Roman custom required, but on their stomach. Around the […]

Egyptian blue predates the pyramids’ final form. Egyptian artisans were producing it before 3100 BCE, making it, as far as archaeologists know, the first pigment humans ever manufactured synthetically. It’s a compound called cuprorivaite (calcium copper silicate), made by firing silica, lime, copper compounds, and alkaline salts at high temperature until they crystallize into a […]

On May 29, 1108, an Almoravid army crushed the forces of Alfonso VI of León and Castile outside the town of Uclés. Among the dead was Sancho Alfónsez, the king’s only son and heir, a loss so severe that medieval chroniclers ranked it among the worst Christian defeats of the entire Reconquista — the centuries-long […]

Gravisca sits on the Tyrrhenian coast of Lazio, in what is today the Porto Clementino area near Tarquinia, roughly 7–10 kilometers (4–6 miles) from the ancient Etruscan city it once served. The site is no stranger to archaeologists: long before Rome arrived, it operated as an emporium, a trading post where Greek merchants — chiefly […]

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]

In a quiet corner of Hadrian’s Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR […]